Over the last few months, the cheapest and most readily-available form of entertainment here in the western half of Ireland has been looking through panes of glass at falling water. Rain: it's one of those natural phenomena that can be very difficult for nature to get right, and this year there's been just a touch too much, for my tastes at least.

In fact, it's been so wet that I found myself, from time to time, humming a song by William Shakespeare that I had first learned in school; I couldn't remember every line, but there's no way I could mistake that refrain, "the rain it raineth every day". When I decided I'd better go back and read it again, I was reminded that it touches on two of the Bard's great themes, the process of ageing and the business of plays and players.

Of course, one of the great things about a rainy day is sitting inside nice and dry avoiding it. You may, with Robert Creeley, take the opportunity to compare the rain's persistence with the mutability of human lives. On the other hand, you might prefer to join Carl Sandburg by his steaming radiator to talk about those less fortunate individuals who find themselves stuck in the wet outside. You should remember, however, that some of these may, like Denise Levertov's Rainwalkers, be quite happy with their lot.

One thing that most people notice about rain is the way it makes things look different. In fact, for William Carlos Williams, a lot, so much, depended on this fact of perception. A similar sense of the transforming power of atmospheric moisture underlies Ezra Pound's well-known two-line poem In a Station of the Metro.

This poem was one of the first successful attempts at bringing over the tone of the Japanese haiku into English, which serves as a reminder that rain has always been something of a conventional sign of the coming in of winter in these seasonal poems. As a result, there are hundreds of rain haiku. My own personal favourite is this one by Basho. The image of a monkey in a raincoat is bound to raise a gloom-dispelling smile.

If poetic convention links rain to winter in Japan, it has an equally strong connection with tears, sorrow and death in the European tradition. In countless poems, raindrops and teardrops falling on graves are indistinguishable one from the other, but few poets have handled this convention more deftly than Thomas Hardy in his Rain on a Grave.

Inevitably, as I type this the sun is shining outside for the second consecutive day, the first time we've had two dry days in a row for weeks. Maybe I should have written this blog sooner! Come to think of it, maybe there's something in the old sympathetic magic idea after all. Just maybe the more rain poems you all post here, the better our chances of an Indian summer. It's got to be worth a try, anyway.